This is a question that seems to come up in one way or another quite frequently. And it makes sense. Being fairly new (on the main stage), these terms are not well defined in the public consciousness (or sometimes even in the heads of those in the field) and so there can be a lot of confusion. There are some out there that think that both are simply creating pretty charts somehow relating to data in some way and there are others that know that the rabbit hole goes far, far deeper…
Business Intelligence and Business Analtyics are both disciplines inside of a wider field of being a Data Professional. Both Business Intelligence and Business Analytics deal with deriving meaning from data. The differences between the two tend to stem from the types of questions each attempts to answer and the tools and processes used to answer those questions.
Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence is the infrastructure. Business Intelligence includes the gathering, storing, and summarizing of data as well as making it available in the forms of reports, dashboards, KPIs, raw queries, and other visualizations to answer questions about the past and present which are commonly used in decision making. Some of these questions might be: What happened? When did it happen? What did it happen to? How much did it happen? Business Intelligence catalogs the past and makes it available for future insight.
Business Analytics
Business Analtyics is the crystal ball. Business Analytics makes use of existing infrastructure (such as data gathered in Business Intelligence) and aims for deeper insight into the data, frequently dealing with predictive analytics about the future. Why did it happen? Will it happen again? What will happen if we make a change? What trends can be expected for the future? Business Analytics makes use of data to provide predictive capabilities.